No one should be the second person to die on a dangerous street
strongtowns.org
strongtowns.org
It seems so distracting for drivers. But it doesn't really seem like the drivers slow down enough to make it safer. I personally prefer to walk along a street that just has a simple stop light or stop sign and crosswalk, rather than a street that has all sorts of weird things in the road that allegedly make it better.
Then you nearly get clipped by a driver that simply ignores or is oblivious to the painted bulb.
If you really care about pedestrian safety, give pedestrians the entire intersection. All red so pedestrians can confirm cars are stopped, then they proceed across or diagonally through the intersection. Aka the pedestrian scramble. It's quite rare in the US.
"""OakDOT found that the protected lanes caused cars to slow down, addressing the most critical factor in surviving collisions. The speed of the fastest cars went down to about 24 mph, while the pace of most other vehicles went down to 17 mph. Collisions between bicyclists and cars also fell by 40% in the first year the protected lanes were in place. The number of pedestrians on Telegraph Avenue also went up 103%, and the number of bicyclists using the street nearly doubled."""
https://oaklandside.org/2021/07/08/protected-bicycle-lanes-t...
But even the head of OakDOT is quoted as agreeing with me here, that their project turned out to be too unsafe! And yet many of the statistics, as you point out, look good. I dunno, I guess we'll see.
It's a nice area, regardless, I just have fundamental doubts about the theory of "if we distract drivers, they will slow down, thus making the roads safer".
As a distance runner who spends a lot of time on the roads, I'm increasingly convinced that signs, speed limits, flashing lights and other flavor of the month gizmos are totally ineffective excuses for not doing what actually needs to be done to improve pedestrian/cyclist safety, which is changing the built environment to a) reduce maximum possible vehicle speed by changing the physical structure of the road and b) providing robustly physically separated infrastructure, extending even to tunnels/overpasses, for non-vehicle traffic. I trust concrete way more than I trust laws.
What is their solution for trucks and buses? It's not only walkers and drivers who navigate on or across streets. A regular old box truck or articulated truck delivering goods (people move house and businesses need to receive and ship goods) even city busses would have a difficult time with a narrowed intersection, unless they made provisions for them.
You have to assume traffic is flowing both ways. The illustration does not depict a vehicle in the opposite direction stopped waiting for traffic/light/stop sign, etc.
The only thing that regularly gets delivered on semi are cars. Moving those to smaller flatbed is more work.
The other thing with semis are moving trucks. But there are smaller ones that work.
> Adding paint at a dangerous intersection should be a quick project that can be undertaken by a roadway maintenance crew in a couple of hours.
But if you did make it a physical bulb-out, there are two things: It's till 24' across, most trucks seem to handle that in neighborhood streets reasonably well already. If it's still a concern, use an approach I've seen in some similar situations where they want to control speed. Make the bulb essentially a very large speed bump, don't give it a steep curb. This prevents most people from speeding around the corners because they won't want to damage their cars, but gives plenty of space for trucks and emergency vehicles, they just have to take it slow.
Also you have to account for two way traffic missing from this illustration ---so it's 12' of space for a turning bus/truck.
There is a fascinating look here into how groups of people handle risk assessment and mitigation. This article isn't even complaining about a lack of mitigation, the complaint here is local communities attempting to mitigate these hazards is illegal. The gap in responses is as wide as it is lopsided.
As soon as it is taxpayer funded and people are directly involved in eating the costs for making things safer, previously high standards drop to ankle level.
Probably the number one argument against universal healthcare, or any governmental program.
and he said "there used to be railings but the poor people take it and sell it to buy food for their families"
made me think and forget about the panic i felt from the dangerous and dodgy slithery road i was on for a moment.